When Ron McCallum was a child, he loved story time. But he was sad not to be able to read a book on his own. It was the 1940s, and McCallum was blind since birth. As his mom told him, “You can’t feel the pictures, and you can’t feel the print on the page.”

“Little did I know that I would be part of a technological revolution that would make that dream come true,” says McCallum, a labor law scholar, in this incredibly sweet talk given at TEDxSydney. “Computers have changed the lives of us all in this room and around the world, but I think they’ve changed the lives of we blind people more than any other group.”

In this talk, McCallum takes us on a tour of the people and technology that allowed him to read — from those who transcribed into braille to the maker of the first blind computer with speech synthesizer, to the inventor behind the Kurzweil reader that scans books and reads them aloud. It’s a fascinating look at something sighted people tend to take for granted.

McCallum certainly has a point — technological innovation has brought some incredible changes for the blind. Below, TED and TEDx talks on more innovations for those who can’t see, some available now and some in the works.

Dennis Hong: Making a car for blind drivers
Much ado has been made about Google’s self-driving car. But Dennis Hong’s creation is a little different — it’s a car which allows non-sighted drivers to get behind the wheel, determine their route and speed, and stay safe with non-visual interfaces. “It’s a vehicle where a blind person can make active decisions and drive,” explains Hong in this fascinating talk from TED2011.

Sumit Dagar: Smartphones for the visually impaired
Most smartphones have glass surfaces — not exactly great if you rely on touch for information. So TED Fellow Sumit Dagar is working on a prototype of a smartphone based on a braille reader. This phone, still in development, will use different surfaces to denote function and will display information via braille. It also allows for braille texting, and will even pull up tactile maps. Perhaps the coolest, though—this phone will be able to scan any text and convert it into braille. And convert photos into feelable outlines.

Bob Lee: How I teach photography to the blind
Photography doesn’t seem like a likely hobby for people with impaired sight. At TEDxSingapore, photojournalist Bob Lee shares how he blindfolded himself to figure out techniques for teaching a five-week photography course for the blind. The key: using sound and tactile cues, plus the auto-functions on today’s smart cameras.

Sheila Nirenberg: A prosthetic eye to treat blindness
Neuroscientist Sheila Nirenberg is working on a technology not just to improve the everyday lives of those without sight — but to give them the ability to see, in the case that they should they want it. At TEDMED 2011, Nirenberg explains her creation — a prosthetic eye that captures images and sends them directly to the brain, by hooking into the optic nerve.

Anthony Dipin Vas: Haptic feedback shoes for the blind
In this incredible video — an ad rather than a TED Talk — a young man walks to school, a young woman strolls outdoors, and an old man navigates stairs. All three are blind. Rather than a cane or seeing eye dog, they are being guided by haptic feedback shoes. These shoes, called “La Chal” and created by TED Fellow Anthony Vipin Das, use GPS technology and vibrations to let their wearers know when to turn, lift their feet and stop to avoid a hazard. (Read a Q&A with Vipin Das on the TED Blog.)

Ewa Marcinek: Cinema for the blind
Ewa Marcinek has a fascinating vision — a movie theater where the blind, who rely on audio description to understand movies, and the sighted, who rely on visuals, can watch movies together without going mad. At TEDxWroclaw, Marcinek explains this unique challenge, and how her team has solved it.

Does listening to music generate colors in your mind? Do bright, lively songs sound yellow or orange while darker, more somber ones sound dark blue and grey? Well, for artist Neil Harbisson,
Neil Harbisson: I listen to color
this happens the other way around. Colorblind since birth, Harbisson has sported an electronic eye since 2004 that fits over the top of his head and allows him to hear the color spectrum instead of see it.

“My head has turned into a music box,” he writes in an essay for TED Weekends on the Huffington Post. “I can hear the sky, I can listen to my mother’s eyes and I can hear rainbows.”

Harbisson is in a way a cyborg — he has created and extended his own senses. And yet, Harbisson says that his antenna has made him feel more in touch with nature than with robots.

Today’s edition of TED Weekends explores the idea of “Hacking Our Senses.” It includes a piece from Harbisson himself, plus three other interesting essays that explore new and colourful ways to understand the world around us. Below, read the openings of these essays to pique your interest.

“Since 2004, an antenna sticks out of my head that allows me to hear the color spectrum, from near infrared to near ultraviolet. My head has turned into a music box. I can hear the sky, I can listen to my mother’s eyes and I can hear rainbows.

I don’t feel that I’m using technology, I don’t feel that I’m wearing technology, I feel that I am technology. I don’t perceive my antenna as a device, I perceive it as a part of my body, I perceive it as an organ. I feel cyborg.” Read on »

“The recent discovery that my son Jeremy sees and feels emotions as colors has been a life changer. Until now, I only saw the difficulties associated with his living in a world that is too loud and too bright. I did not know about the beautiful, colorful portraits of people that he paints in his dreams.

In “I Listen to Color” Neil Harbisson describes how he translates sound into colorful portraits. In much the same way, Jeremy translates the emotions of people into portraits — only he does it in his sleep.” Read the full essay »

“In April 2000, a bizarre research paper appeared in the pages of Nature, one of Britain’s oldest and most venerable scientific journals. In the paper, Mriganka Sur and his colleagues claimed they’d achieved success in a Frankensteinian experiment: They’d surgically re-wired the visual nerves of young ferrets into regions of the animals’ brains that usually process sound. As the ferrets matured, the paper said, their brains’ audio regions gradually took on the appearance and function of brain areas that deal with vision — even growing brand-new neural structures to process visual orientation. In other words, these ferrets’ brains had apparently learned not only to ‘hear’ light, but to generate visual perceptions of the sights their eyes ‘heard.’” Keep reading »

]]>http://blog.ted.com/2013/07/27/ted-weekends-hacks-our-senses/feed/5Neil-Harbisson-at-TEDGlobal-2012emmietedNeil Harbisson explains why he can hear color at TEDGlobal 2012. Photo: James Duncan DavidsonLooking into the future: A stem cell development to cure blindness, plus a playlist of visionary talkshttp://blog.ted.com/2013/07/25/looking-into-the-future-a-stem-cell-development-to-cure-blindness-plus-a-playlist-of-visionary-talks/
http://blog.ted.com/2013/07/25/looking-into-the-future-a-stem-cell-development-to-cure-blindness-plus-a-playlist-of-visionary-talks/#commentsThu, 25 Jul 2013 21:42:27 +0000http://blog.ted.com/?p=80361[…]]]>Scientists in London have achieved a significant breakthrough on the road to curing blindness this week.

Certain kinds of blindness are caused when photoreceptors — the cells in the retina that react with light and send an electrical signal to the brain — die off. Researchers at Moorfields Eye Hospital and University College London have, for the first time, created a technique to transform stem cells into photoreceptors and inject them into the eyes of mice. The BBC reports that studies of this technique in humans are not terribly far off. Says lead researcher Robin Ali, “Five years is a now a realistic aim for starting a clinical trial.”

“To restore vision, safely and effectively, is an enormous challenge,” she tells the TED Blog. “We are incredibly excited by the British group’s advance in creating working photoreceptors from stem cells. However, many eye diseases do not discriminate between cell type, resulting in tissue-wide damage. At NYSCF, we enable work that complements the British group’s advance. Our collaborators have been applying similar techniques to create the eye cells supportive of photoreceptors.”

To celebrate this development towards the restoration of vision, below a playlist of talks on blindness and sight — from a car for blind drivers to a new way to experience color.

Pawan Sinha: How brains learn to see
Pawan Sinha on how brains learn to see
Pawan Sinha gives blind children the gift of sight. In this talk from TEDIndia 2009, Sinha details his research on the development of the brain’s visual system, offering insight into neuroscience and engineering, as well as into autism. Sinha and his research team provide free vision-restoring treatment to children born blind, and then study how their brains interpret this new visual data.

Neil Harbisson: I listen to color
Neil Harbisson: I listen to color
Artist Neil Harbisson experiences color through sound. Born completely color blind, Harbisson now wears a device attached to his head that allows him to perceive the world around him in a symphony of color, listening to faces, paintings and colors beyond the range of sight.